Story-wise, the aircraft serves as the mobile headquarters of Fourth Echelon, the super-spy's ultra-secret, anti-terrorist special forces group. The straight-line aspect of the game, the first effort from the Ubisoft Toronto studio, only becomes apparent if you really stop to think about it.Īt the core of this well-disguised illusion is Fisher's new base of operations, a giant, technologically tricked-out cargo plane known as the Paladin. While the new Splinter Cell: Blacklist is definitely not an open-world game – it's actually hard to imagine the franchise straying that far from its roots – it is a fantastic hybrid of sorts that throws so many options and choices at the player that its linear nature is thoroughly hidden if not forgotten entirely. It's why open-world games, where players can effectively do whatever they want at their own speed, have become so popular in the past few years, and why we're seeing a steady raft of them being released. Sure, there were usually different routes and possibilities for him along the way, but in the end the games played pretty much the same for anyone who attempted them.īut video games are supposed to be a medium that – uniquely among entertainment offerings – affords consumers with agency, so the idea of being dragged through one by the invisible hand of its developer will inevitably become archaic if not quaint. In each of the series' five previous main entries, super-spy Sam Fisher has indeed been tasked with getting from one point at the beginning of a level to another at the end of it. Games in the "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell" family have historically leaned toward such linear experiences. These are, of course, the types of games where players must go from point A to point B, with few choices or different outcomes in between.
There will come a day in the not-too-distant future when we will all wonder why we ever enjoyed linear video games.